Wednesday, December 7, 2011

Last year, I got it in my head to put together a Portal Gun for the Penny Arcade Child's Play annual charity dinner in Seattle. Child's Play is an awesome cause, and one I am very happy to support. Gamers often get a pretty bad reputation in media and the public eye, but this organization has been pulling together millions of dollars for children's hospitals for years now and has really shown what our community is capable of.

Well, last year went fantastically, and the auction is coming up again tomorrow. I really went down to the wire on this one, but this year I'll be bringing a Gravity Gun from Valve's Half Life franchise for auction.

The Gravity Gun has been a little bit of a combination of white-whale-unattainable and Sistine-Chapel-level-intimidating for me ever since I thought about getting into propmaking. Its complicated, intricate, and if I didn't get it just right, I'd have about a million gamers ready to tell me exactly why.

Normally I don't toss up show-off posts with just pictures, but as the auction is tomorrow, I really wanted to get the word out about this piece. If you'd like to contribute, certain lots will be available for proxy bidding over the phone. This means you don't necessarily have to be at the dinner in order to bid! If you're interested, please contact Jamie Dillion at jdillion@childsplaycharity.org to learn about remote participation.

I should note that the Portal Gun fetched a little more than twice what my car is worth, so if you're planning on proxy bidding then be prepared!

I will have a process blog post about the build of the Gravity Gun, as per my usual style, in the coming weeks. Until then, please enjoy these fantastic photos by my friend Dan Almasy. (Facebook in the link, Flickr here)

Finally, thank you to everyone in the gaming community for making things like this happen.